Zetsuen no Tempest 24 — Life isn’t a Play

A rather lackluster ending, in my opinion. Yoshino’s fine, he just got shot in the arm. Hanemura looks like he’s about to lose. Then ninjas teleport a giant golden sword to him and he throws it at the tree and it splits in half. They should’ve sent an axe instead so he could chop it down. Now that would have been kind of cool.

Then the tree turns into butterflies, everyone poses and talks about how they all worked together even though the giant magic sword did most of the work. Kind of a lame ending, all in all.

But after the tree was gone the ending did get a bit more interesting:

The show actually rejects Aika’s philosophy. He doesn’t want his story to be that of Hamlet or the Tempest. He’s going to write his own script.

For most of this show, I was complaining about the constant Shakespeare references. But if they were working towards this ending, all those references suddenly make much more sense.

Mahiro’s big decision to follow his own path makes a lot of sense, considering his character. He was always the type who did what he wanted and didn’t care about the rest of the world, so his philosophy would never have been something so easy to pin down. It also shows that he’s grown past his initial desires for revenge and justice.

Yep, he did grow up a lot in this show. I appreciated how it wasn’t a heavy-handed growth either. He didn’t really monologue too much about how he got past revenge, he just chose not to hold the girlfriend thing against Yoshino and subsequently loosened up.